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Bill Starke is Chief Architect of Power CPUs at IBM > Bill Starke: So I know a lot of people don't hear all the details about us. We're not super well known, b

Bill Starke is Chief Architect of Power CPUs at IBM > Bill Starke: So I know a lot of people don't hear all the details about us. We're not super well known, but actually when you swipe something on your phone, you know, when you click something, most of the time it's running through a power computer, you know, hidden behind a curtain somewhere. You're running in, you know, all the world's top enterprises. This claim is very much contradicting my view. I'm expecting phones to run ARM, and servers to run Intel/AMD. I'm also expecting a lot of lower level hardware these days to be on ARM. I know you can get routers - maybe big iron routers? - running POWER, but I've not seen it anywhere else. Anyone cast some light on this?

Kon-Peki 2y ago
A lot of "big compute" stuff from before the rise of the cloud was on mainframe-y type hardware. And still is, because migration is really really hard. Where I work, we're still trying to migrate a bunch of services off of VMS+Itanium. My experience thus far is that putting this stuff in the cloud on commodity x86 is not really any cheaper or more performant. But it should end up being way easier to support and extend in the long run, so is probably still worth doing. The main problem that I run into is actually a people problem. There is no defined roadmap for doing this stuff, so it kind of feels like greenfield development, and you end up with endless bikeshedding and cargo-cult-driven design patterns. The happy path is easy, but it all falls apart on the edge cases. But handling the edge cases is why the customer pays you money... Anyway, I'm sure that IBM will continue to make and sell Power CPUs for a long time if only because it will take forever to migrate off of them.
hindsightbias 2y ago
The largest back ends don’t want you to know what they’re running. It’s a competitive advantage. Name a Fortune 500 and most have Z or Power. Many have both. It just works. That’s what they care about. As an example, the back end of most pharmacy companies use a software package that evolved from a product named Catamaran. It’s not on what you’d assume it’s on: https://www.hireitpeople.com/resume-database/87-sql-developers-resumes/258675-rxclaim-production-support-iseries-as400-specialist-resume-richardson-texas https://www.hireitpeople.com/resume-database/87-sql-develope...
rbanffy 2y ago
> Anyone cast some light on this? POWER is well positioned for socket or core-based licensing (Oracle uses core-based, IIRC). Intel and AMD do two threads per core, AMD does one. POWER does up to 8. If you have an Oracle database, running it on a POWER system under AIX might save you some money. POWER also runs the IBMi platform, a distant descendant of the AS/400. It's a very sophisticated operating system, with interesting concepts such as making no distinction between RAM and disk - everything lives in a single address space from the OS's PoV. Weird, but also cool (it's always cool to use something that's neither Unix nor Windows).

Kon-Peki 2y ago

A lot of "big compute" stuff from before the rise of the cloud was on mainframe-y type hardware. And still is, because migration is really really hard. Where I work, we're still trying to migrate a bunch of services off of VMS+Itanium. My experience thus far is that putting this stuff in the cloud on commodity x86 is not really any cheaper or more performant. But it should end up being way easier to support and extend in the long run, so is probably still worth doing. The main problem that I run into is actually a people problem. There is no defined roadmap for doing this stuff, so it kind of feels like greenfield development, and you end up with endless bikeshedding and cargo-cult-driven design patterns. The happy path is easy, but it all falls apart on the edge cases. But handling the edge cases is why the customer pays you money... Anyway, I'm sure that IBM will continue to make and sell Power CPUs for a long time if only because it will take forever to migrate off of them.

hindsightbias 2y ago

The largest back ends don’t want you to know what they’re running. It’s a competitive advantage. Name a Fortune 500 and most have Z or Power. Many have both. It just works. That’s what they care about. As an example, the back end of most pharmacy companies use a software package that evolved from a product named Catamaran. It’s not on what you’d assume it’s on: https://www.hireitpeople.com/resume-database/87-sql-developers-resumes/258675-rxclaim-production-support-iseries-as400-specialist-resume-richardson-texas https://www.hireitpeople.com/resume-database/87-sql-develope...

rbanffy 2y ago

> Anyone cast some light on this? POWER is well positioned for socket or core-based licensing (Oracle uses core-based, IIRC). Intel and AMD do two threads per core, AMD does one. POWER does up to 8. If you have an Oracle database, running it on a POWER system under AIX might save you some money. POWER also runs the IBMi platform, a distant descendant of the AS/400. It's a very sophisticated operating system, with interesting concepts such as making no distinction between RAM and disk - everything lives in a single address space from the OS's PoV. Weird, but also cool (it's always cool to use something that's neither Unix nor Windows).